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In Metal Saga, players take control of a boy becoming a young man in a post-apocalyptic world filled with bizarre machines, bizarre creatures, and ultimately bizarre machine-creatures. The father of the main character was a Hunter and like all good little boys, he wants to be just like his Pop. Hunters do exactly what the name suggests, they hunt creatures great and small in order to accrue cold, hard cash.

Hunting in Metal Saga can be dangerous work, so most Hunters decide to use vehicles with mounted artillery to assist them in taking out the really big “prey.” Unfortunately these vehicles get damaged during battle and need to be restocked with armour, repaired, and upgraded which all costs money. Sometimes players will find after a difficult hunt that they have barely broken even after paying the skill use fees, paying for an inn to heal, repairing the vehicle(s), and restocking. Bring frivolous with skills can lead to being in debt an exorbitant amount.

In Metal Saga, numerous memory games such as dancing and flexing muscles by pressing various buttons on the controller and pointless minigames reminiscent of Atari console games exist to break up the monotony of hunting and gathering. None of the minigames have anything to do with the storyline and neither do they do much to assist you in your journey except give prizes which can be sold for much-needed cash. Monotony, unfortunately, is a large problem with Metal Saga. While the Outlaw fights can be difficult and there is humourous interaction between characters, the battle system is very basic and tends to get tedious. Humour is the one saving grace which Metal Saga has been blessed with. Wacky, self-degrading phrases and outright jokes abound. Even the NPCs and enemies have humourous names such as the used tank salesman “MC Hamir”, “Klepto Cobain” who only speaks in Nirvana lyrics, and a living unicycle knifeblade.

The graphics and sound in Metal Saga, like the minigames, are reminiscent of much earlier gaming consoles. I would expect to see the graphics from Metal Saga on a Super Nintendo game, not a Playstation 2 game. While the character art was adequate for an RPG, there was nothing which screamed out, “Next Generation Console Game.” The background music, little more than MIDI files on repeat which only change depending on your location. Sound effects are decent in the battle scenes, but all in all the sound in Metal Saga were highly disappointing.

Overall I enjoyed Metal Saga for its fresh spin on the post-apocalyptic RPG. Worth the cost of the game for hard-core RPG gamers, it is still fairly suitable for newbies to the genre and young teenagers. The only serious changes I would have made would be to revamp the graphics to take advantage of the next generation system and to add a richer, more moving musical score. The gameplay is solid as is the storyline and the game could be finished in a couple of minutes or it could take upwards of 40 hours.